[giraffe_lady]

> It's not just the far right that's uncomfortable with this kind of policy and rhetoric

It really kinda is though. HN commenters generally lean a lot harder right than they are aware of and/or want to admit. This belief about a "growing tendency towards sheltering oneself and others from all emotional discomfort" is straightforwardly a right wing view.

[lolinder]

> HN commenters generally lean a lot harder right than they are aware of and/or want to admit.

That's a perception that is common among left-wing commenters who find themselves exposed here to right-wing ideas for the first time. As someone who actively seeks to represent whichever perspectives are underrepresented in a given context (down to specific threads), I can assure you that HN leans pretty firmly left. I very rarely need to take the left-wing perspective here when trying to provide balance.

(Obviously you only have my word for it, but my friends and family all think I'm a raging liberal because I represent the left to them.)

> This belief about a "growing tendency towards sheltering oneself and others from all emotional discomfort" is straightforwardly a right wing view.

If Jonathan Haidt is a right-wing activist from your perspective, then sure. I don't think most people see Haidt that way, and certainly don't think he sees himself that way.

[giraffe_lady]

The guy whose writings the american right loves and quotes constantly? IDK how he views himself. But his argument is a modern variant on "the weakness/degeneracy of contemporary youth" which has an inherently reactionary heart.

[lolinder]

Your way of thinking is so... polar. Does everyone need to be sorted into progressive or reactionary? Could concern for the state of youth be simply a humane reaction to the doubling of teen suicide rates [0]?

Are you really going to ignore the calls of 'fire' just because some reactionaries cried 'fire' in the past?

I think the political right likes to quote Haidt slightly more than the left because the right is slightly less prone to blindness about this issue than the left—their priors line up. But that doesn't exclude willful blindness on the part of the left—sometimes the youth really are in crisis, and there's a lot of evidence that our natural antifragility is the problem.

[0] https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/databriefs/db471.pdf

[giraffe_lady]

FWIW I don't even neatly fit into progressive or reactionary: I'm deeply religious and it's not one of the accommodating ones. So I'm sympathetic to the right wing view on this, holding it to a significant extent myself.

I'm not dismissing this position because of similarity to other reactionary movements in the past, I'm rejecting it because of how this reactionary movement is using it to mobilize a revanchist assault on the rights of minorities, women, queer people. An issue that "rational centrists" like Haidt and the general consensus of HN commenters certainly seem blind to and sanguine about their part in.

[lolinder]

We can't just abandon teens to suicide because right-wing revanchists use the same data to attack other teens. That's exactly the kind of dodging of uncomfortable truths that I'm concerned about—we plug our ears and pretend it isn't happening so as not to hurt one group of people. Because we can't deal with the dissonance everyone gets hurt.